Corporate America to Private Lending

Mike Hambright (00:23.276)
Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. Today I’m here with Ryan Kadlec and we’re gonna be talking about the move from corporate America into private lending. Ryan, welcome to the show. Hey, thanks for having me, Mike. Yeah, so we just talked here for a bit. We have similar stories in that we’re corporate refugees, so I wanna talk about that a little bit, because I think…

If anybody’s listening to this that’s from corporate America, hopefully we inspire them a little bit to bet on themselves, maybe. Yeah. Yeah. But there’s a whole other world out there that people are afraid of sometimes, I guess, right? Yeah. I would agree. Yeah. Thanks for having me, Mike. Yeah, I chuckled. I hadn’t heard the corporate refugee term before. I might have to trademark that. It’s true. it might already be trademarked. I actually have a really good friend that’s trademark attorney, so we had to check with Angela. There you go. Yeah, tell us about your background.

We’re to talk a lot about lending today and learn little bit about you. let’s talk about, you didn’t start here, you started somewhere else. What’s your story? Yeah, thanks for asking. I’m happy to share. It was always fascinating to me to hear how people got to wherever they are in their life journey. For me, very unusual. Out of high school, I enlisted in the United States Air Force, so I’m a product of 9-11 happening when I’m in high school.

wanted to do my duty to serve my country. So I spent four years in the Air Force, did one deployment over in Afghanistan. So proud of my service. But I had my first child when I was overseas and family is really important to me. So I had the opportunity to reenlist and we decided to go a different route. I wanted to be there for my family physically. So I went to school for finance. So I’m a finance guy. I know that you said that that’s in your background as well. And it’s hard to take that out of us no matter how hard.

hard to try, but I actually ended up going into operations initially out of school. But I still felt passionate about finance. Really kind of growing up during the Great Recession, I was drawn to the financial markets, and so I ended up eventually at a large financial services firm. Thought I was going to be the guy where you walk into the branch and making recommendations on your portfolio, and that was kind of my dream. And life always has a way of throwing you a curve ball, and what I like to say is just

Mike Hambright (02:40.751)
Keep an open mind. Keep your options open. Don’t pigeonhole yourself into one direction. So I ended up in operations again. And what I found is I really love operations. I ended up moving into a director of ops role at that financial firm and had about 40 people working for me. I really loved the experience of leadership. Really stretched me as a person. It was a really humbling experience to get to pour into people in such a tangible way and then see that come back.

opportunity came to pivot out of that corporate job and not just join a smaller company with a totally different set of values and a different vision, but my business partner is actually my brother. So being the family person that I am, I thought, is this the right opportunity? And there’s a lot of, I think, fear that goes into leaving that set paycheck. You know what to expect. You know when it’s coming. You know how much is coming.

but in talking with with Joel

You know, I really spent time with my wife, praying through that decision. And as much as I loved my current role, and I was going to miss the people that I had really poured a lot into, it was going to take something special to move me out of that role. And I decided that fixed lending was the right thing. And here I am now doing private lending. So totally different ball game. But it’s been great so far. Yeah. You got to kind of bet on yourself, right? I don’t know if this is where you were. think in corporate America, this is where I was, is I fell

got to the point where I felt like I had worked like there’s a couple of times in my life where I get to a point where I’m like

Mike Hambright (04:22.653)
OK, there’s two of us that report to my boss. And my boss has a counterpart. And they report to this guy that’s 20 feet that way. And it’s just like, I can see the next 10 years of my life right here. And I’m not excited about that. Do you start to get to a point to where there’s some combination of wanting to maybe stake your own claim or kind of do your own thing? And was there any part of it that was like,

man, I can see my life before my eyes here and that’s not good enough for me. Absolutely. Yeah. The hard part for me was leaving the people that I had grown to love so much. Right. Like that’s the group of folks that I was entrusted to being good steward of their careers and not just their careers, but I’m a big believer in corporate America. Not like you should know who you’re working with. Right. Like what motivates them? What does their family life look like? And so, you know, it was hard for me to let that go. But to your point, I looked into the future and I

I wasn’t expecting to be in a director role at that time of my career and it just kind of fell into my lap. I got a little bit lucky there. But looking beyond that, the folks that worked for me, they were always asking me, one, how did you get into this role? And two, where are you going from here? And every time I thought about where I’m going from here, I didn’t love the outcome. There’s some stress that comes along with not being in control of your own destiny, not being in control of the core values that your organization sets, not being in control

of the policies that are being set by HR. And sometimes there was a misalignment of values there. And I thought the further I go down that path, it’s probably going to only increase my frustration from here. Am I really doing my team a service by staying? Or is it better for me to make room for one of these people that I’ve really poured a lot into to kind of take over and make their mark? So I 100 % agree with you. at the end of the day, it was one of those situations where I thought, OK, I’m probably going to

to be better serving my family and my community by moving aside and taking a different direction. Yeah. I also recall the feeling, because it’s been a while for me now, is when I look back now, it’s like you’re playing a game. Like inside of any company, there’s a game. It’s like, these are the roles. These are the paths. And there’s not many usually. It’s like these are a few ways you can go. And if you look back in hindsight, it’s like it’s so limiting. Like this was the board game. But now I have a game room. I can pick whatever game I want to play.

Mike Hambright (06:46.607)
You know, I you’re in lending now you could change that I I’ve changed things a number of times that I’ve been an entrepreneur I mean, I’ve done a lot of worn a lot of hats as an entrepreneur, but I got to dictate my path I a lot more, you know a lot more control over my paths right potential paths, right? There’s plenty of people that have gotten into real estate investing that find their way into lending or find their way into coaching or find their way into some product or service that they needed when they were a real estate investor and now they Do that or they run a mastermind like me or there’s you know, there’s a lot of ways you can go and there’s people that have

left you know real estate and gotten into something else completely but so let’s talk a little bit about the like I want to talk about like how much you think corporate America has benefited you where you are now and I’ll start this by saying I used to kind of poopoo it I’m like

Because I’m surrounded by people that a lot of them don’t even have college degrees and are wildly successful. like, I didn’t need any of that education. was a complete waste of time. But the truth is, is as time has gone by, I’m like, I’m a more critical thinker. Like, I think bigger. I’m probably better at planning and kind of creating SOPs or at least knowing they need to be created. And things like that. But would you say that the corporate background has benefited you in your current business where it wasn’t a requirement, but does it help you? Yeah. So that’s a great

question. I’m a big believer in that things happen for a reason. you know, sometimes we want to force something to happen before it’s meant to be. And so sometimes letting the opportunities come to you is important. And you know, I was meant to be in that role at that time. And there were there were some down days and there were some really frustration, you know, frustrating experiences there. But they happened for a reason. And they led me to this point at this time. And I appreciate you saying that because, know, my brother’s not here so I can kind

throw him under the bus. He’s an entrepreneur at heart. He really never did the corporate thing. And so to your point, I think that there’s a good balance and there’s a good give and take of, the entrepreneur wants to throw on those rose colored glasses. Everything’s always going to go up and everything’s going to be wonderful. looking from my financial background, it’s like, hey, there is value in having a standardized process for certain things. We don’t want to over-engineer things, but we do want to have some consistency. We do want even some redundancy sometimes, if it makes sense.

Mike Hambright (09:06.511)
We don’t want to have single points of failure. So I’m hoping to bring some of that to the organization, but I also believe that, you when we go through things like a corporate job, it gives you a different appreciation for the life that you’ve been living now that I’m just kind of starting this journey of.

there is a different way. It’s not necessarily right for everyone, but having more options and knowing what’s available to you I think is extremely empowering. I try and use this with my kids all the time. See, I grew up overseas as a kid, and so I understand what we have in the United States, and they don’t necessarily know. And so when you’ve gone through an experience like that, it gives you that perspective that you can’t have without going through it. So yeah, I think that it gives perspective, and there’s definitely some things that I can bring to the table that my business

as partners maybe don’t have. So I count it as a blessing that I went through that experience, for sure. Yeah, I think it gives you an appreciation for when you work for larger company and if you have an HR issue, there’s an HR person for that. And when you’re a small business, you’re truly the CEO or you have a few partners, but you’re the leader and the chief bottle washer. You’ve got to do everything. There’s a problem with a light bulb somewhere. It might become your problem. Yes, exactly.

What I’ve kind of found is that makes me think bigger. Like, how do I build a bigger team? How do I afford to build a bigger team? Because I don’t want to have to the label. Yeah. Right. I want to do the right time? Yeah. Right. And so there’s a lot of folks that are afraid to leave corporate America. In my instance, I was pretty much forced to leave two times in a row. you know what they say about like the third time. I don’t know.

first time shame on me, second time shame on them or something like that, I don’t know. But at any rate, I’d learned enough at that point to know like, I don’t have enough control here over the destiny of my family and my own financial future and I work really hard, I’ve always worked really hard and so why keep doing that for somebody else? That was my jumping off point. You had an opportunity that opened up with your brother that…

Mike Hambright (11:12.565)
was your jumping off point. And I think there’s a lot of people that, like you said a little bit ago, you know when you’re going to get paid and you know how much. And I would argue you think you know that because at some point that could go away. There’s plenty of people that have had the carpet ripped out from under them. Right. And so I’ve kind of found having been around this industry for a long, time, I’ve done a couple thousand podcasts now for real estate professionals. And there’s a common theme of a lot of people like we’re bumping up against the bottom and not successful until they got backed into a corner and then they took off.

That’s not everybody’s story, but that’s a common story of something bad happened and then I figured it out. I think that that’s a problem that a lot of people have is they wait until they have a bad health issue to fix how they eat or how they take care of themselves. Or career-wise, they wait until they get fired from a job before they go find out what’s next for them. That’s not the right way to do it necessarily. People are forced to do it at that point. How would you advise people that are in court

corporate America that want something else out there that are just super comfortable, how would you encourage them to take that jump and bet on themselves if that’s in the cards? Yeah, I had that conversation a lot. I wasn’t the only one that was dealing with some of those frustrations. we would have transparent conversations. And I think you’ve got to surround yourself with people that are going to be encouragers, not discouragers. And so I tried to be that to my team. I had other people who, hey, they really were invested in growing their career there. And that’s awesome.

you love this organization, stay focused on that, Someone’s gotta work that job. And there were great opportunities internally there as well. anytime someone came to me and said like, I’m thinking about maybe something outside of maybe this team, or I’m thinking about something outside of the organization entirely, or even outside of the industry, I always encouraged them, hey, it’s never too early to start networking, to start surrounding yourself.

with people that are in that industry that you’re interested in getting in. Put yourself out there. Let it be known. And whatever that community is that you are in, whether you go to the gym a lot, whether you are a church person, let people know. Because they will start to plug you in with folks that are connected. And that’s, think, really the key. You really got to surround yourself with people that are going to lift you up, that are going to encourage you to take that first step. And to your point, if you wait until your back is against the corner, sometimes the adrenaline

Mike Hambright (13:42.138)
enough but sometimes it’s too late. Don’t let that be you. Start taking steps now and you know when my brother picked up the phone and he called me to offer me this opportunity

I’ll be honest, there was definitely some fear there. I’ve got a wife, I’ve got three kids, I have a mortgage. And in the back of my mind, I’m thinking, I’ve been preaching to my folks for years now, don’t be afraid to take a leap of faith. If you know in your heart, it’s the right thing to do, don’t live with regret, take the step. You can always fall back on something at some point, but you gotta take risks sometimes. And so that really helped keep me honest to practice what I was preaching.

to take that step. So I’m really glad that I did. And I’m still figuring out as I go. have by no means have this thing figured out. But what’s been really awesome for me, Mike, is in the last couple of months, I’ve had several former teammates reach out to me and say, hey, I went and got that interview or, hey, I’m thinking about starting that business now. I filed a paperwork for the LLC. And so what a humbling experience for me that me taking that step hopefully is going to kind of give them that nudge.

think that’s the key, right? Like I said, getting people in your corner that are going to encourage you to take that step. Because there’s a lot of, don’t do that. That’s ridiculous, right? Why would you give that up? Why would you take that risk? And we need to be encouraging one another. Yeah, that’s awesome. So I guess there was some comfort in the fact that your brother, who’s one of the founders of the company, they already had kind of a proven model in lending. Absolutely. And he’s not here with us, obviously.

But they were real estate investors that got into lending. Tell us a little bit about that. Yeah. So Joel, my brother, he was really passionate about investing in real estate. And me being a finance guy, I’m like, that’s awesome. Good for you, man. You go find those deals, flip those houses. I’ll put my money in mutual funds and collect my 10 % and call it a day. I’m cool with that. So he got started very early on in life and got a full education in what it’s like to be on the ground level as a real estate investor.

Mike Hambright (15:52.96)
nine yards, right? Fix and flips, buying old Reynolds burrs. But when he met Justin, our other business partner, they teamed up and they started doing a wholesale business in Tulsa and Oklahoma City, assembled a team. They were really successful with that. And I thought they would do that for a while. So I was surprised when Joel told me, hey, we’re pivoting over to, you know, being the banker now, we’re going to be the lenders now. And so the more I started talking to him, like trying to understand, like, what was the motivation there, you

guys were killing it. You were doing awesome, high volume. And I found that at the core of it was they were passionate about serving the community in a way where they could build more deeper connections, deeper relationships on the wholesale side. You find that deal, you help that person out of that situation. It’s really rewarding if you’re doing it in a way with integrity and character. But then you’re on to the next deal and you’re not building a relationship with that seller. They’re moving on to whatever it is. Very transactional. This business

is more relational. And so what I loved about it was, hey, I love spreadsheets. I love analyzing a deal. love analyzing an investment opportunity, but I also love relationship. And I love being here just talking with you today. So it kind of marries both of those things where it’s very customer service centered business, but also firmly rooted in stewardship of financial assets and financial investments. So when he called me and really explained at the

of what they’re doing with fixed lending, thought, that’s a great opportunity, right? That’s something that is very much aligned with my core values and who I am as a person. Yep. And so we talked about this a little bit before is, and this conversation on relationships is going to come back into play here, I think, is.

You could throw a stick, as they say, and hit a lender. There’s a ton of lenders out there, right? And there’s a lot of people that have moved in. There’s huge national lenders. When I first started in 2008, there weren’t large, hard-money lenders yet. They didn’t really exist. That was really a result of big corporate America getting into the housing business, buying houses, and being able to raise tons of money on Wall Street. And then they couldn’t buy houses anymore. Like, what do we do with all this money? Well, let’s lend it. And a lot of huge lenders popped up then. And of course, there’s tons of little bitty private lenders.

Mike Hambright (18:12.427)
that don’t even really think of themselves as a lender. They’re just a friend or family member that are lending to people. so how do you guys, how do you differentiate yourself, do you think, in this marketplace today? There’s plenty of opportunity out there. There’s always opportunity out there for people that are good at relationships, people that do what they say they’re going to do, people that care about other people. So I think that not to say that how are you guys possibly going to do this at all because you’re doing it now, but it’s more of just how do you differentiate yourself as a lender in a market like DFW with 8 million people?

a bunch of lenders, how do you differentiate yourself? Yeah, a bunch of lenders. No, it’s a great question.

We still have most of our deals in Oklahoma. So Texas is a new market for us. We’ve done a few deals here. What you described is certainly what I’ve run into right when I’m out there at meetups just talking to folks. There’s a lot of the bigger players. And then there’s the mom and pop say I went out to my cousin or whatever. I think we’re somewhere in the middle there. So we want to be very strategic about how we grow in Texas. The market isn’t what it was even a year or two ago here.

So, you know, when we look at opportunities for the borrowers, obviously we’re really passionate about making sure that they’re getting into good deals. And for me, something that’s different, if you picked up the phone and you called me, it’s gonna be me every time, right? We don’t have a team of loan officers. It’s literally just Ryan in Texas and it’s Joel in Oklahoma. We’ll walk the property with you. We tend to be a good fit for maybe people with less experience because we’re gonna,

We’re going to walk that property. We’re going to look at that scope of work. We’re going to make sure that you’re getting yourself into a good situation. And, you know, when we do that deal with you, we’re putting our skin in the game, too. So we’re coming into the deal with you. And, you know, we’re about that collaboration mindset of, hey, nobody has everything figured out. Let’s be collaborative first. Let’s be vulnerable with one another. Let’s learn together and hopefully grow that relationship where we

Mike Hambright (20:19.503)
can do repeat business. So we keep it small. We’ve got a small team. Again, we only lend in the areas that we know that we can actually walk the property with the borrower. And so we want to grow, but in a way that’s very sustainable, very strategic, and very scalable as well. Yeah, that’s great. I think in my early years as a real estate investor, I thought of the lender as kind of like a necessary evil. It’s all an expense, right? It’s just all expense.

As time goes by, and I talked about this on another show recently, you start to realize these are partners. It’s a different kind of partnership, but this business is full of partnerships in lots of different ways. It could be on the acquisition side, a deal partner. could be on the Dispo side, somebody that helps. Even it could be people inside of your team are really your partners as well. I think that lenders, especially the way you described it here, there are, not to take anything away from any sort of lender, but there are big faceless lenders that don’t

you don’t know any contractors here, don’t know this market, don’t know anything. And then there’s the ones that can hold your hand through the whole thing and say, hey, your HVAC guy screwed you. Like, hey, I know another person that’s really reliable. Start to plug you in. Because you have a vested interest in keeping your money safe. Absolutely. And you want them to be successful because you want them to win and you want them to come back and do business with you again, right? Absolutely. I there’s a lot of people that think that a lender, they have negative thoughts of lenders.

They want to bilk me for everything I possibly can. It’s like, they want to build a relationship to have repeat business, typically. Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So I think that’s how you differentiate yourself is just on service, Yeah. Yeah, I think it’s that. And I think it’s also being very honest.

with our clients, right? Like we’re not always gonna be the best fit and that’s okay. Sometimes that bigger lender is a better fit or sometimes if a close family member’s offering you something that works better for you, it’s okay, right? We wanna make sure that we’re setting people up for success whether it’s with us or not. And what we’re running into is they might have a few deals over here with one organization and they’re doing a couple with us as well and it’s a symbiotic relationship where everyone can win, that’s really what we’re looking for.

Mike Hambright (22:39.8)
Yeah, and I think you talked about working with lot of newer people and I think those are the ones that need to be willing to work with.

more likely should work with somebody local because they understand the market. They understand the landscape. They understand maybe that neighborhood very specifically. Talk a little bit about how you can help people kind of stay safe when they’re newer. Yeah, think so. So, you know, obviously it’s it’s really at a level where we feel super comfortable with working with people of all different experience levels in Oklahoma here. You know, I think what we’re really focused on, you know, me being more of the the conservative guy in the business, you know, coming from the

The world of finance, yeah, I know. like, my brother’s probably gonna be like, dude, lighten up. He’s gonna have to sometimes. I tighten him up, he loosens me up, it works, But I think making sure that people are sticking to what’s working right now. I was just walking a property in Ulysses with a borrower earlier this week and…

He gets it. It was 1,400 square feet. He’s going to list it for under $350,000. He knows what he’s doing. Sticking to what works and not trying to squeeze too much out of a deal. That’s what we’re really looking to provide folks is, hey, this is what’s working right now. We can see the running on the wall, right? And to your point, is there some selfishness in there for us? Yeah, we want you to be successful so that we can continue to do deals together. But yeah, we want to be able to provide that extra level of value.

and expertise to our borrowers because to your point it’s more of a partnership for sure. Yeah, awesome. Well if folks want to learn more about what you’ve got going on here and I guess if they’re in Oklahoma or the DFW market where can they go to learn more? Yeah, I would say the best spot is to just go to our website www.fixlending.com and there’s some resources there that you can look at analyze your deal for free. We have our own podcast that we do as well. Not here we don’t

Mike Hambright (24:41.525)
a meetup in DFW, but if there’s any listeners in Oklahoma, my brother Joel does a meetup in person in Tulsa so you can meet him. He had someone in his home the other day and they recognized him from the podcast. So they got a picture on Facebook and he’s all like, I’m famous now. Yeah, he’s like Brad Pitt. Yeah, I know. Yeah. No, but the website I think is probably the best spot to go to to get more information on who we are and what we’re about. cool. Thanks for joining us today. Yeah. Thanks, Mike. Yeah. Guys, thanks for joining us today. Show. There’s a lot of

As I keep saying, a lot of ways to make money in real estate, whether you’re actually doing deals or you’re a lender. Some people play the role of both. For those of you that are in corporate America or in some role that you don’t like or you feel that you’re unhappy with, there is life on the other side of that wall jumping into entrepreneurship. The big thing is just jump into it.

smartly I guess. Find people that you can surround yourself with that can help make that a soft landing and you don’t have to start from scratch. You don’t have to start cold and you really should try to find some way to kind of partner with people to kind of ease into it and surround yourself with people that are way ahead of you on the learning curve. So, appreciate you guys and we’ll see you on the next show.